Digital Agriculture Sandbox for Collaborative Research

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Digital Agriculture Sandbox, a secure platform that facilitates privacy-preserving collaboration between farmers and researchers using advanced techniques like federated learning and differential privacy.

Contribution

It presents a novel online platform that enables secure, privacy-preserving data sharing and analysis for digital agriculture research, addressing farmers' privacy concerns.

Findings

Enables farmers to share data securely without exposing private info.

Allows researchers to analyze farm data while maintaining privacy.

Facilitates collaboration between farmers and researchers for agricultural improvements.

Abstract

Digital agriculture is transforming the way we grow food by utilizing technology to make farming more efficient, sustainable, and productive. This modern approach to agriculture generates a wealth of valuable data that could help address global food challenges, but farmers are hesitant to share it due to privacy concerns. This limits the extent to which researchers can learn from this data to inform improvements in farming. This paper presents the Digital Agriculture Sandbox, a secure online platform that solves this problem. The platform enables farmers (with limited technical resources) and researchers to collaborate on analyzing farm data without exposing private information. We employ specialized techniques such as federated learning, differential privacy, and data analysis methods to safeguard the data while maintaining its utility for research purposes. The system enables farmers to identify similar farmers in a simplified manner without needing extensive technical knowledge or access to computational resources. Similarly, it enables researchers to learn from the data and build helpful tools without the sensitive information ever leaving the farmer's system. This creates a safe space where farmers feel comfortable sharing data, allowing researchers to make important discoveries. Our platform helps bridge the gap between maintaining farm data privacy and utilizing that data to address critical food and farming challenges worldwide.